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- Title
- Change of heart : the influence of the external environment on academic library collections
- Creator
- Dean, Jennifer Lynn
- Date
- 2019
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
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"The academic library, affectionately referred to as the heart of the campus due to its physical and metaphorical centrality to academic life, has undergone significant change since the 1990s. The advent of the internet and rapid advances in technology have wrought wide-ranging change in academic libraries. Although the library literature confirms the changing environment surrounding academic libraries and librarians, many library papers are individual accounts of processes and best practices...
Show more"The academic library, affectionately referred to as the heart of the campus due to its physical and metaphorical centrality to academic life, has undergone significant change since the 1990s. The advent of the internet and rapid advances in technology have wrought wide-ranging change in academic libraries. Although the library literature confirms the changing environment surrounding academic libraries and librarians, many library papers are individual accounts of processes and best practices with little connection to the literature on organizational change. This dissertation study focuses on changes in academic library collections and collection development and acquisitions (CDA) practices. The collection is perceived by administrators, faculty, students, and librarians themselves as centrally important to the library and the institution. Although the library collection is essential to teaching, learning, and research, it has received little attention in the higher education literature. I interviewed 14 librarians at two regional, public, research institutions in Michigan. Using Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) to frame this study and analyze the results, I examined the role of the external environment and its influence on the strategies academic librarians used to perform CDA work. Participants identified funding, curriculum, faculty, students, administrators, and vendors and publishers as environmental influences, indicating that the library functioned as a separate organization within its institution. Librarians employed a variety of strategies to manage environmental constraints, maintain balance, and preserve library and academic culture, including information gathering, communication, budgetary management, and relying on collection use data."--Page ii.
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- Title
- Discourse and grammatical cues in the acquisition of Spanish pronouns
- Creator
- Forsythe, Hannah
- Date
- 2018
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
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"From an acquisition standpoint, personal pronouns are particularly interesting to study because they are a perfect encapsulation of the problem faced by the language learner: how to coordinate information from multiple levels of representation while still in the process of acquiring those representations. Pronoun interpretation is influenced by constraints at every level of representation, from phonology to discourse, and acquisition at one level can constrain the path of acquisition at...
Show more"From an acquisition standpoint, personal pronouns are particularly interesting to study because they are a perfect encapsulation of the problem faced by the language learner: how to coordinate information from multiple levels of representation while still in the process of acquiring those representations. Pronoun interpretation is influenced by constraints at every level of representation, from phonology to discourse, and acquisition at one level can constrain the path of acquisition at other levels. This dissertation focuses on the interaction between the levels of morphosyntax and discourse during development, specifically, how the acquisition of person and number features relates to the acquisition of discourse relations: the semantic relations between events and states in a discourse. Person and number cues provide bottom-up information about who the referent of a pronoun can and cannot be, while discourse relations provide top-down information about which referents are likely to be the targets of pronominal reference. The question for acquisition is very simple: Do children proceed bottom up or top down? Focusing on preschoolers acquiring Mexican Spanish, a language with abundant person and number cues, we divide the problem into three parts: Q1.Which person and number cues are children sensitive to, and when? Q2.Which discourse cues are children sensitive to, and when? Q3.How do children integrate these cues together at different ages? Person and number cues: In picture-selection and act-out tests, children show early comprehension of 1st and 2nd person morphology but inconsistent behavior in the 3rd person. Children are aware that 3rd person pronouns select a referent or antecedent from the preceding physical or linguistic discourse, but they fail to consistently choose referents compatible with their person and number morphology. Discourse cues: Adults use a combination of discourse relations and pronominal form (null vs. overt subjects) to interpret grammatically ambiguous subject pronouns. Children under 4 ½ show sensitivity to discourse relations, while children over 4 ½ show sensitivity to the null/overt contrast. Integration: Four picture-selection experiments examine children's sensitivity to different discourse relations, first in isolation and then in combination with person and number cues. When cues to the Parallel discourse relation appear in isolation, children show weak sensitivity at best. However, when parallelism and number cues are combined, parallelism has a facilitating effect on the comprehension of number by children ages 4 ½ and up. Moreover, this facilitating effect coincides with a jump in children's overall sensitivity to number morphology. When cues to the temporal discourse relation Occasion appear in isolation, we again find little evidence of sensitivity. However, when temporal and person cues are combined, temporal cues have a facilitating effect on the comprehension of 3rd person features by children ages 4 ½ and up. Moreover, this facilitating effect coincides with a jump in children's overall sensitivity to 3rd person morphology. In other words, we see a correlation between sensitivity to discourse relations (Parallel, Occasion) and adult-like use of person and number morphology. Do children proceed bottom-up or top-down? Children's difficulty with at least some person and number cues, plus their early sensitivity to at least some discourse cues, rules out a strictly bottom-up hypothesis. However, their early adult-like use of 1st and 2nd person morphology also rules out a strict topdown hypothesis. Instead, we come down in favor of a weak version of the top-down hypothesis. Specifically, we claim that while children have early representations of the full set of person and number features, this knowledge is more difficult to deploy when interpreting semantically and morphologically underspecified pronouns (3rd person singular and 3rd person plural), and that discourse sensitivity facilitates the interpretation of such pronouns."--Pages ii-iii.
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- Title
- Rural migrant Hausa girls, a community faith-based school, and environmental change in Sokoto, northwest Nigeria
- Creator
- Idris, Abubakar
- Date
- 2019
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
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Engaging with feminist and post-colonial theories to examine the ways in which gender identity, gender power, and gender relations are enacted, this dissertation examines a shift that has recently been occurring in the education of rural Hausa girls, whose families are increasingly sending them to residential Qur'anic schools in metropolitan Sokoto rather than to government schools. At the root of this change, it identifies Hausa parents' desire to entrench traditional gender roles grounded...
Show moreEngaging with feminist and post-colonial theories to examine the ways in which gender identity, gender power, and gender relations are enacted, this dissertation examines a shift that has recently been occurring in the education of rural Hausa girls, whose families are increasingly sending them to residential Qur'anic schools in metropolitan Sokoto rather than to government schools. At the root of this change, it identifies Hausa parents' desire to entrench traditional gender roles grounded in the cultural values and principles of Islamic religious ideology. To fulfill this aim, however, these parents must disrupt another aspect of the existing system of traditional gender roles, in which girls disproportionately farm and perform household duties. Moreover, it identifies the driving force of such disruption as Hausa fathers, who as the major decision-makers in their households are often making these schooling choices on their daughters' behalf in the face of sharp opposition from their wives. As a result, Hausa mothers must adjust to the loss of a major source of household labor, among other effects of the absence of their daughters from their homes. In other words, families lose their daughters' labor contributions when they leave their rural communities to go to Qur'anic schools in urban centers like Sokoto. The dissertation concludes by drawing the attention of the Nigerian government to its new data on the cultural and religious issues that should be considered by policymakers seeking to bring free universal primary and secondary education to under-served rural Hausa children and families in Northern Nigeria.
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- Title
- Robust global motion compensation and its applications
- Creator
- Safdarnejad, Seyed Morteza
- Date
- 2017
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
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This thesis presents algorithms for robust global motion compensation (GMC). GMC algorithms are used to remove camera motion and transform the video such that in the resultant video, the background appears static and the only motion rises from foreground objects. Many computer vision algorithms are tailored for static camera, and using GMC, it is possible to apply these algorithms on videos from moving cameras. For instance, motion-based video analysis is strongly affected by camera motion....
Show moreThis thesis presents algorithms for robust global motion compensation (GMC). GMC algorithms are used to remove camera motion and transform the video such that in the resultant video, the background appears static and the only motion rises from foreground objects. Many computer vision algorithms are tailored for static camera, and using GMC, it is possible to apply these algorithms on videos from moving cameras. For instance, motion-based video analysis is strongly affected by camera motion. If camera motion is not compensated, it interferes with the motion of interest, such as motion of human, and renders the analysis problem to be more challenging.Generally, in sequential schemes, GMC estimates the homography transformation between two consecutive frames by matching keypoints on the frames, and maps the second frame to a global coordinate. Then, by accumulating these transformations, a composite transformation is calculated which maps each frame to the global coordinate. However, existing GMC algorithms are sensitive to existence of foreground motion and fail easily in the case of considerable foreground motion or ambiguous and low texture background.To address the challenges in GMC, first, we propose a Robust Global Motion Compensation (RGMC) algorithm which explicitly suppresses the foreground effect and utilizes a comprehensive probabilistic verification model to find the best mappings between consecutive frames. Despite the robustness offered by RGMC, we further identified the problem of temporal drift of the estimation, due to accumulation of errors in estimation of mappings between consecutive coordinates. Furthermore, to address the issues of sequential GMC, we propose a Temporally Robust Global Motion Compensation (TRGMC) algorithm which by joint alignment of input frames, estimates accurate and temporally consistent transformations to the global coordinates. Joint alignment not only leads to the temporal consistency of GMC, but also improves GMC stability by using redundancy of the information.Many applications can benefit from a reliable and accurate GMC algorithm. We first briefly look into these applications. Then, among the many applications, we further investigate the problem of sequence alignment, and propose an alignment algorithm for non-overlapping sequences, enabled by performance of TRGMC. Given the transformation to a global coordinate, offered by TRGMC, and capability of background reconstruction using TRGMC result, we are able to align sequences even if the spatial overlap between the sequences is minimal or nonexistent. To this end, we first spatially align the sequences such that extrapolated backgrounds are aligned well and trajectory of moving objects are spatially smooth in the global coordinate. Next, we temporally align the sequences based on the smoothness of spatio-temporal trajectory of moving objects across field of view of different cameras.
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- Title
- School board decision making practices
- Creator
- Beard, Nicole R.
- Date
- 2017
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
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ABSTRACTSCHOOL BOARD DECISION MAKING PRACTICESByNicole R. BeardThe purpose of this study was to examine the way in which school boards use data when making decisions, specifically their orientations, perceptions, concerns and priorities around data. This study sought to understand how school boards use data when setting or tracking progress toward goals and aimed following the process of board use of data to discern how they create knowledge upon which to base their decisions and direct...
Show moreABSTRACTSCHOOL BOARD DECISION MAKING PRACTICESByNicole R. BeardThe purpose of this study was to examine the way in which school boards use data when making decisions, specifically their orientations, perceptions, concerns and priorities around data. This study sought to understand how school boards use data when setting or tracking progress toward goals and aimed following the process of board use of data to discern how they create knowledge upon which to base their decisions and direct subsequent action. Three school boards were selected based on specific criteria that were found beneficial to the study’s purpose and goal. Participants were sent an online survey to complete, as well as observed during board meeting and committee meetings. In addition, each superintendent and two school board members from each district participated in face to face interviews regarding their views on the role of data when making decisions. The results of this research study brought into focus how organizations such as these learn about data and put this knowledge into action in the form of decision making. As school board members examine data, they take part in an information sharing cycle that transforms the data into contextually relevant information that in turn becomes knowledge. This knowledge can be acted upon and enables school boards to validate their reasons for the decisions made as a collective body. Learning about this cycle can be helpful in helping community members and other stakeholders better understand the level of analysis that takes place when board members make decisions.
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- Title
- Measurement of isobaric analogue resonances of 20742077Ar with the active-target time projection chamber
- Creator
- Bradt, Joshua William
- Date
- 2017
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
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While the nuclear shell model accurately describes the structure of nuclei near stability, the structure of unstable, neutron-rich nuclei is still an area of active research. One region of interest is the set of nuclei near N=28. The shell model suggests that these nuclei should be approximately spherical due to the shell gap predicted by their magic number of neutrons; however, experiments have shown that the nuclei in this region rapidly become deformed as protons are removed from the...
Show moreWhile the nuclear shell model accurately describes the structure of nuclei near stability, the structure of unstable, neutron-rich nuclei is still an area of active research. One region of interest is the set of nuclei near N=28. The shell model suggests that these nuclei should be approximately spherical due to the shell gap predicted by their magic number of neutrons; however, experiments have shown that the nuclei in this region rapidly become deformed as protons are removed from the spherical 48Ca. This makes 46Ar a particularly interesting system as it lies in a transition region between 48Ca and lighter isotones that are known to be deformed.An experiment was performed at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) to measure resonant proton scattering on 46Ar. The resonances observed in this reaction correspond to unbound levels in the 47K intermediate state nucleus which are isobaric analogues of states in the 47Ar nucleus. By measuring the spectroscopic factors of these states in 47Ar, we gain information about the single-particle structure of this system, which is directly related to the size of the N=28 shell gap. Four resonances were observed: one corresponding to the ground state in 47Ar, one corresponding its first excited 1/2- state, and two corresponding to 1/2+ states in either 47Ar or the intermediate state nucleus. However, only a limited amount of information about these states could be recovered due to the low experimental statistics and limited angular resolution caused by pileup rejection and the inability to accurately reconstruct the beam particle track.In addition to the nuclear physics motivations, this experiment served as the radioactive beam commissioning for the Active-Target Time Projection Chamber (AT-TPC). The AT-TPC is a new gas-filled charged particle detector built at the NSCL to measure low-energy radioactive beams from the ReA3 facility. Since the gas inside the detector serves as both the tracking medium and the scattering target, reactions are measured over a continuous range of energies with near-4π solid angle coverage. This experiment demonstrated that tracks recorded by the AT-TPC can be reconstructed to a good resolution, and it established the feasibility of performing similar experiments with this detector in the future.
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